The Power of Sidechaining in Absynth

Sidechaining is not only used to create pumping bass sounds, it has a lot more interesting uses, this week we look at sidechaining in Absynth

Let’s start with the basics

Sidechaining is the process of linking an audio trigger to an effect.
What this means is that you are going to use an audio signal, such as a kick drum, to control something in a plugin or synthesizer.
In the dance world the kick is often used to “duck” the bass, so every time a kick hits the bass gets a little bit softer to make room for that kick.
You set this up by sending a copy of the kick drum channel to a compressor on another channel, then you tell that compressor to lower the volume every time a kick hits, so now your compressor is “listening” to the kick drum channel.

This is a very basic trick but it can be really useful, if you never worked with sidechaining before I suggest you try to set this up, there are a lot of video’s explaining how to do that in your DAW.

What’s next?

Today however we are going to look into some different sidechaining methods, I am going to use a drumloop to trigger the sound in Absynth.
So every time a drum hits it is going to tell Absynth to play a note.
We make sure we don’t hear the beat itself by sending it just to Absynth and not to the output/your speakers.

This is a great way to add rhythm and groove to your tracks without having to program a lot of percussion.

We also look into the Audio In module in Absynth, this basically turns it into an advanced effect processor, you can send anything through it and control the sound with envelopes and filters.

So spend some time with this if these topics are new to you, and I’m sure you will find a bunch of new creative ways to use these techniques!